This bilingual blog - 'आन्याची फाटकी पासोडी' in Marathi- is largely a celebration of visual and/or comic ...तुकाराम: "ढेकणासी बाज गड,उतरचढ केवढी" (Tukaram: For a bedbug a bed is like a castle. so much climbing up and down!)... George Santayana: " Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence"...William Hazlitt: "Pictures are scattered like stray gifts through the world; and while they remain, earth has yet a little gilding."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

H. P. Lovecraft: "What a man does for pay is of little significance. What he is, as a sensitive instrument responsive to the world's beauty, is everything!"

John Gray: "Unlike Schopenhauer, who lamented the human lot, Leopardi believed that the best response to life is laughter. What fascinated Schopenhauer, along with many later writers, was Leopardi’s insistence that illusion is necessary to human happiness."

Justin E.H. Smith: “One should of course take seriously serious efforts to improve society. But when these efforts fail, in whole or in part, it is only humor that offers redemption. So far, human expectations have always been strained, and have always come, give or take a bit, to nothing. In this respect reality itself has the form of a joke, and humor the force of truth.”

Tuesday, April 09, 2013

Henry Miller:"Often, when I listen to the radio, to a speech by one of our politicians, to
a sermon by one of our religious maniacs, to a discourse by one of our eminent
scholars, to an appeal by one of our men of good will, to the propaganda dined
into us night and day by the advertising fiends, I wonder what the men of the
coming century would think were they to listen in for just one evening."

("You will not find a single hard word in the entire Dnyaneshwari...such tenderness lies at the beginning of our literature is a matter of great happiness...")

Joseph Brodsky:"...Freedom is when you forget the spelling of the tyrant’s name..."Agastya (also Agasti) was one of the Vedic Rishis (inspired poets); his name is given as the author of several hymns in the first of the 10 chapters of the Rigveda. Vinoba Bhave(विनोबा भावे) has written a brilliant essay on him. Here is a part of the same:
['विनोबासारस्वत' (Vinoba Saraswat) edited by रामशेवाळकर (Ram Shewalkar) 1987]

But today I remember him for another thing.

"OnestoryaboutAgastyagoesthatoncethedemonshadtakenrefugeintheoceananditwasdifficultforthegodstovanquishthem,sotheywenttoSageAgastyaforhelp.Then,afterhearingthegods,thesagedranktheentireoceanwaterandhelditwithinhimuntilthedemonsweredestroyed.Afterthedemonsweredestroyed,Devtasrequestedhimtosavetheseaanimalswhoweredyingbecauseoflackofwater.AtDevtasrequestAgastyaRishireleasedallthewaterasurineandthatiswhytheseawaterbecamesalty."It has happened before: A great man has peed to fill up an ocean. Therefore, I wonder why another great man of this century can'tdo it again to fill up a damn dam.

I have read a few film reviews of Mr. Ebert. In recent years, I have used them to decide whether to watch a film or not. (By the way- I was mildly surprised to see some Marathi newspapers reporting passing of Mr. Ebert. I wonder if any of them has ever printed a translation of his review.)Mostly, I have benefited from his advice.I like what Maureen Dowd wrote about him in The New York Times in September 2011:"...Ebert likes movies about Good People who do
the right thing, like “Casablanca”; Bad People who do the right thing, like
“The Silence of the Lambs”; and Bad People who have a sense of humor, like
“Goodfellas.”

He asserts that “modern actors are handicapped
by the fact that their films are shot in color” rather than the more mysterious
black and white. “Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet are, and will remain, more
memorable than most of today’s superstars with their multimillion-dollar
paychecks,” he writes.

He complains that his life “has been devoted
in such large part to films of -worthlessness.”

“Hollywood dialogue was once witty,
intelligent, ironic, poetic, musical,” he says. “Today it is flat.” He mourns
that “it sometimes seems as if the movies are more mediocre than ever, more
craven and cowardly, more skillfully manufactured to pander to the lowest
tastes instead of educating them.”..."

(From the list of movies above, I love Casablanca, I like Goodfellas and I don't like The Silence of the Lambs.)

..."it sometimes seems as if the movies are more mediocre than ever, more craven and cowardly, more skillfully manufactured to pander to the lowest tastes instead of educating them" is more true of Hindi films than Hollywood ones.

(Marathi films are slightly different. Ideas behind some of them are good but the final product that comes out on the screen- cinema- is mediocre. Marathi news TV, newspapers and people involved with the film try talking it up but it does not work for me. You don't laugh while promoting a comedy. No sermonising on your own love, happy marriage will help. It has to come from within of the watcher while watching your film.)

But I like another side of the late Mr. Ebert more: a New Yorker cartoon caption contestant. He won the contest after failing at 107 of them earlier.

Following is one of Mr. Ebert's failed attempt and, it was a failure only because of the 'Caption Contest Board of Censors' at the New Yorker. (I wonder why it was not sent to Playboy. Playboy has published some great cartoons. Marathi Diwali magazine Awaaz would have probably published it.)

This picture lifted my spirit as much as the tray on that plane! I have not traveled on a plane since I saw this. If and when I do, I will remember this.

Pages

Will Self: “To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail – the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short. It is this failure – a ceaseless threnody keening through the writing mind – that dominates my working life, just as an overweening sense of not having loved with enough depth or recklessness or tenderness dominates my personal one.” John Berger: “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.” Ezra Pound: "Make it new"...Mark Twain: "Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that “plagiarism” farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance except plagiarism!... For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.”… John Crowley: "Meanwhile the real world then, no matter what, will be as racked with pain and insufficiency as any human world at any time. It just won’t be racked by the same old pains and insufficiencies; it will be strange. It is forever unknowably strange, its strangeness not the strangeness of fiction or of any art or any guess but absolute. That’s its nature."...Alexander Waugh: "Beware of seriousness: it is a form of stupidity"...Charles Simic: "There is a wonderful moment when we realize that the picture we’ve been looking at for a long time has become a part of us as much as some childhood memory or some dream we once had. The attentive eye makes the world interesting. A good photograph, like a good poem, is a self-contained little universe inexhaustible to scrutiny." ... Hilary Mantel: “It’s for Shakespeare to penetrate the heart of a prince, and for me to study his cuff buttons.”… Ingmar Bergman: "It is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life"... Graham Greene: "Kim Philby betrayed his country-yes, perhaps he did, but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country?"... Friedrich Schlegel: "Hercules…labored too…But the goal of his career was really always a sublime leisure, and for that reason he became one of the Olympians. Not so this Prometheus, the inventor of education and enlightenment…Because he seduced mankind into working, [he] now has to work himself, whether he wants to or not"... Walt Whitman: “Do I repeat myself? Very well then, I repeat myself.”...W H Auden: "…though one cannot always/ Remember exactly why one has been happy,/ There is no forgetting that one was"...Walter de la Mare: "No, No, Why further should we roam / Since every road man Journeys by, / Ends on a hillside far from Home / Under an alien sky"...Franz Kafka: “You can hold back from the suffering of the world. You have free permission to do so, and it is in accordance with your nature. But perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.”..."Over these unremembered marble columns, / birds glide their old remembered way. / Dive in red gold setting tide and write dark alphabets on evening sky /whether an epitaph, chorus or strange augury / little man you only hope to know!"